The DOM appears to have a huge overhead. It does so because it supports event propagation and bubbling. It does because it supports binding events to a DOMElement.

If you do not need any of the features of DOM3 events then use a pub/sub library of choice.

[Edit 2]

That's all about error handling, how you do error handling is upto you. If you know your event emitter is synchronous then that's intended behaviour. Either do your own error handling or use setTimeout to make it asynchronous.

Be wary that if you've made it asynchronous you "lose" the guarantee that the event handlers have done their logic after the emit/trigger/dispatch call returns. This requires a completely different high level design then the assumption that event emitters are synchronous. This is not a choice to make lightly

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